Communication Working Group/Volunteer Manual/Content Pillars
The Five Content Pillars
Everything the CWG publishes falls into one of five content pillars, though the pillars are not rigid categories and a single piece of content will often serve more than one. Their purpose is to guide decisions about what to prioritise and how to keep the output balanced over time, with a rough target of fifteen to twenty-five percent of posts from each pillar measured over any six-month period.
Pillar 1: Important information about the OSM project.
This covers:
- infrastructure news,
- technical projects,
- service outages, and
- significant data developments.
Most of this content originates with the Operations Working Group or OSMF staff rather than with the CWG itself.
Your role will often be to edit it for a general audience and ensure it reaches the right channels promptly. A post about a major server upgrade or a change to the tile rendering pipeline is a typical example.
Pillar 2: Diverse stories of the OSM community.
This is the heart of the CWG's original content work and the pillar where the group has the most creative latitude. Typical content is:
- Mapper of the Month profiles,
- coverage of local and regional SotM events,
- humanitarian mapping stories,
- community project features
The content is anything that puts a human face on the people who are actually building the map. Representing underrepresented regions and voices is an explicit priority here, not an afterthought.
There are many associated organisations like Local Chapters, Youth Mappers, GeoChicas etc. who also generate news of interest to the OSM mapping community which fits in this pillar.
Corporate sponsors of OSM may have interesting news stories too. Summarise or amplify their corporate press releases that are of interest to OSM mappers. OSMF has a policy of no advertising, but this does not prevent selected news stories about our sponsors.
Build a relationship with WeeklyOSM . Provide stories to them and amplify stories that they publish.
Pillar 3: OSMF Board communications.
The Communication Working Group is the main distributor of news about the activities of the OSM FOundation and Board. Stories will report on:
- Board elections; candidates, candidate manifestos, voting procedures,
- Board meetings; agenda items of interest,
- Strategic planning updates; especially those affecting the community,
- Major governance decisions; like the upcoming move to the EU, and
- Transparency reporting.
The Board generates some of this content, and the CWG can itself find interesting stories from Board Agenda items. The CWG's role is to shape how it is presented, ensure it reaches the right channels, and sometimes draft or edit content on the Board's behalf.
Pillar 4: Fundraising support.
The OSM movement depends on donated funds. To support fundraisng the CWG has an important role is providing media about the movement, the Foundation and about users of our data. This is then used in:
- Social media campaigns,
- Improvements to donation pages, and
- Communications to and about corporate members.
The CWG works closely with the Fundraising Committee on this pillar. You will not be expected to lead fundraising strategy, but you may well be asked to write fuundraising campaign copy, to draft social media posts, or help refine the messaging.
A bank of existing campaign ideas, sample posts, hashtags, and a prior campaign kick-off plan is available.
Pillar 5: Corporate member communications.
The corporate members are the primary source of funds for the movement. The OSM Foundation wants to support them as they support us. The CWG is the publicity arm on the Foundation that keeps our corporate sponsors in public view. This is achieved by:
- Announcements of new corporate members, with profiles of their work,
- updates on corporate contributions, and
- communications that support the Advisory Board's relationship with corporate sponsors.
This pillar overlaps naturally with Pillar 4 and is coordinated closely with the Advisory Board coordinator and the Board itself.